Author: tonyandrewmeyer

dev, education, dad

Corrections to JGC’s Spam and Anti-Spam Newsletter #37.

In John Graham-Cumming‘s Spam and Anti-Spam Newsletter #37, John printed comments from Gordon Cormark regarding the TREC 2005 Spam Track submissions:

Several submitted by participants have their heritage in a filter product, but are experimental in the sense I mentioned above, and not available for download or purchase: […] tamSPAM (spambayes as configured by Tony Meyer)

However, this is not correct. I emailed John the comments below, but it seems he didn’t feel they were worthy of including in later issues. This doesn’t bother me (it’s a minor enough thing), they got lost in his mail. They’ll be in a later issue, but for the record, I’ll reproduce them here. Continue reading “Corrections to JGC’s Spam and Anti-Spam Newsletter #37.” →

Ah, podiobooks, anyone?

Podcasting’s first professionally-produced original drama series, SHADOW FALLS tells the eerie tale of a remote Northeastern town that holds secrets some will kill to protect and others will die to expose.

Shadow Falls @ PodShow.com

“Shadow Falls” has been getting a lot of hype on the DSC recently (to be expected, since Adam Curry was involved in production), but it’s weird how both Adam and listeners are describing this as something new.

Podiobooks.com has been serving up serialised fiction via podcasts for some time now (they have a great range – check them out), not to mention Escape Pod‘s short fiction (or more radio-show-style podcasts like The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd).  Scott Sigler is on (finished?  I’m a bit behind) his third original podcast novel, which is hosted by PodShow.  In fact, I remember Adam mentioning Infection on the DSC (not just playing a promo, but raving about it).

It’s nice to have another story, but that’s all it is.

I’m not all that convinced about the “first professionally-produced” claim, either.  What does “professionally-produced” mean?  That it was done in a professional manner?  That someone was paid to do it?  Seems like Scott Sigler’s podcasts are professionally produced, as are some of the podiobooks.com ones.  In fact, podiobooks.com offer a service where they produce the podiobook for the author.  If that’s not “professionally-produced”, I don’t know what is.

I’d put a comment about this on the DSC or “Shadow Falls” pages, but you have to log in to PodShow Plus to do that, and I can’t.

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PodShow Plus: Three strikes – they're out.

PodShow Plus sounded interesting, and I listen to quite a few PodShow podcasts (probably 90% of the podcasts I listen to come from PodShow, Farpoint Media, or the TWiT network), so a few days after the opening, I created a (listener) account (tonyandrewmeyer), and created a channel with a dozen or so of the shows I listen to (mostly the PodShow and TWiT ones). I’m not really sold on the idea of channelling all my shows through a single feed (I can’t check for new episodes of an individual podcast without a web browser, and it’s a single point of failure), but thought I’d see what all the fuss was about.

All seemed well at first. However, after a day or two, suspiciously few podcasts were coming through the channel feed. I checked, and, sure enough, the real feeds had episodes that the channel did not (strike one). (This bug has been mentioned on the DSC and is apparently fixed now).

I tried to log in to check the channel and see if I could fix the problem. However, I can’t login – it tells me that the details are wrong. The email address isn’t (or I wouldn’t have got the “welcome to podshow” email, which I did). I can’t see how the password could be wrong, but I suppose there’s a slim chance that I made the same typo twice in entering it (the password was blank in the “welcome” email – I have no idea if that is deliberate or not), so no strike for this, even though I’m 99% sure that it’s PodShow’s error and not mine. I used the “send me a new password” function (several times, now – so I have no idea what the password might be now), but have not received any such email.

Spam filters, you say? Nope, since I work on anti-spam software, I ensure that all filtering is off (apart from the gmail address, which isn’t the one I used). Anyway, the “welcome” email made it through, and I’ve grepped through all the received mail. Strike two.

Eventually giving up, I used their support contact function, explaining the problem (pretty clearly, in my opinion). That was about a week ago, and I have yet to hear anything at all (c.f. spam filters, above). Strike three (and this one is the worst).

So, while I still enjoy many PodShow podcasts, and I have no doubt that they’re trying to do something worthwhile, PodShow Plus isn’t something I’ll use or recommend. (For now, at least).

[Update (August 8th): three and a half weeks later, I got a reply to my support request. That’s just about as bad as not replying at all, in my opinion. Supposedly the problems I described have been fixed. However, I still can’t login. I’ve retried the “send me my password” link, but nothing has arrived yet.]

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Another Honeypot Success

Back on February 1st, I received notification that a MX entry that I donated to Project Honeypot helped identify a previously unknown email harvester. Last Thursday, I received notification of another success.

Stop Spam Harvesters, Join Project Honey Pot

This is an interesting (although statistically irrelevant) speedup (about a year for the first, and about five months for the second). I’ve donated MX entries from two other domains (tangomu.com and badtomatoes.org) since then, so it’ll be interesting to see what the rate is for those (which certainly get hardly any spam compared to the original donation).

If you have the ability to, it would be great if you donated, too.

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More Baby Ultrasound Editing

A couple of scans ago, I wrote up my process for converting the VCDs we get from our ultrasounds into something that I can use in iMovie. We had our final scan today, and I finally got around to improving the process. I'm not sure that I'll need this again, but in case I do, here it is:

I used IsoBuster to convert the VCD data into an MPEG-2 (ignoring invalid data).I then used Ultra MPEG Converter to convert the extracted MPEG-2 to MPEG-1 (no resize, ensuring that the height and width are set as in the original (which is not the default)).

Quicktime is able to work with this file, and it's not overly large, but the scans have a border that I don't really want (textual information that isn't relevant, and isn't legible at low resolutions). iMovie doesn't have the ability (as far as I know) to crop an image, so I needed to do this with something else. I found an Open Source tool, VirtualDub, that handled this. I simply opened the file, turned off the audio track (since it didn't contain anything anyway), trimmed off the end of the file (I could have done that in iMovie, but doing it now saves processing that part), and did the crop.

To do the crop, I applied a "null transform" filter (a filter is necessary to crop, but I didn't actually want to apply a filter) and then cropped appropriately. I saved the file as an AVI compressed with the Cinepak codec.

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Checking for new podcasts at a specific time in iTunes (Windows)

As far as I can tell, you can't tell iTunes when you want to check for new podcast episodes – it simply adds the periodic time (e.g. 24 hours) to the last time a check was done.

My ISP has changed their broadband usage system so that half of my monthly transfer allowance is "off-peak" (from next month, 2am to 10am). This really doesn't suit me well, as I typically spend only about an hour to two hours (8am or 9am to 10am) of this time online, so what I end up with is a huge chunk of unused allowance, and maxing out my "peak" allowance.

I don't want to change my habits so that I schedule everything for download. The point of having broadband was that I got what I wanted when I wanted it. The exception to this is podcasts, which are all time-shifted anyway, so I don't care when they download. They also account for a reasonable portion of my downloads (in terms of size – particularly the two video podcasts). So I really want these to download these around 4am.

One way to do this would be to get up at 4am one day and manually update. However, I like my sleep. That also means that if I ever decided to 'check now', I'd have to redo this.

So, my solution is to write a little Python script that tells iTunes (via COM) to update all podcasts, set iTunes to only update manually, and have Windows run this Python script as a scheduled task. If you want to do anything with this script, help yourself (it's really only 6 lines).

#! /usr/bin/env python
"""Tell iTunes to update all podcasts."""
import win32com
import pythoncom
import win32com.client

def main():
    pythoncom.CoInitialize()
    app = "iTunes.Application"
    iTunes = win32com.client.Dispatch(app)
    iTunes.UpdatePodcastFeeds()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

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Distributed manual verification of a corpus

John Graham-Cumming (of popfile, among other things), has setup a site for manual verification of the 2005 TREC Spam Track corpus.  The idea is that as many people as possible go to the site and manually classify the messages that are presented as ham or spam.

The TREC corpus was primarily classified automatically, so it's possible that there are errors in the corpus.  It's an interesting experiment, and I look forward to reading papers about the results (and possibly using a more correct corpus). It's a shame that the TREC corpus is the best one available, since the mail is pretty old, and it's a weird collection of (Enron, I believe) mail from different people.  It will be particularly interesting to see if there are messages that many people disagree on – some messages are particularly hard to classify, since you don't know what the interests/subscriptions of the original recipient were.

The site itself is particularly well done, IMO.  Not only do you get the raw email, but you are presented with a screenshot showing you what the message looks like in a typcial mail client.  This is a great idea. 

I encourage everyone to go to the site and classify at least a few emails.  It doesn't take much time, and it's a great contribution. 

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Skype 2.5 (Beta)

I found out (via GeekBrief.tv) that a beta of Skype 2.5 is available, so downloaded it.  I use Skype quite a lot for text messaging (because MSN is so unreliable), as well as some SkypeOut calls (if the lag was a bit less, I would happily switch to it for all my outgoing calls, since Telecom has put me in Helenville, which is nowhere near me and so I make no local calls) and the odd Skype call (I have one in-law, my parents, my sister, and one friend that I can call – not a large selection!).

2.5 adds some nice little features.  Making SkypeOut calls is much simpler, since I can dial ’09 414 0800′ rather than ‘+64 9 414 0800’, and it will add the New Zealand bit for me.  If I have to call another country, it’ll sort out the country code for me.

Much more handy is the ability to SMS ("txt") through Skype.  I would much rather txt via a computer (when at home) than via my phone.  For a long time I used the fantastic smspop service (great interface, great price), but it sadly died a while back.  I looked around for a while, and the best I could find to replace it was ipipi.com, which is ok, but not great (price-wise, or interface-wise).  Using Skype seems to be pretty convenient.

However, it is pretty pricy – €0.13 per txt, which comes out to about NZ$0.27, which is about 150% of what it costs to send via my cellphone.  So I’m not really sure the convenience is worth it.  But if the price drops (or the cost of txt’ing via prepay phone in NZ increases) then I’m sure I’ll use it a lot.

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MySky Glitch

After about a month of working as well can be expected, a weird MySky glitch occured the day before yesterday. All of the scheduled programs (all done via series link) more than a day in the future vanished from the planner.

Unfortunately, I was later home yesterday than anticipated, so wasn't able to manually add the programs back. When I did arrive home, I pressed record and was told that I could not record this program (for any program). I rebooted MySky and not only was I able to record again, but all of the scheduled programs (those that hadn't been missed) were back.

Inexplicable glitches are the worse type, because now I'm back to not trusting it to record again. I wonder if I should reboot it once a day, or something like that…
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